Delaware Magistrate Judge Recommends Finding Nielsen Audience Measurement Patent Ineligible

A magistrate judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware today issued a Report and Recommendation to grant a motion by VideoAmp, Inc. to dismiss The Nielsen Company (US) LLC’s complaint against it for infringement of Nielsen’s patents related to audience measurement systems because the patents are directed to ineligible subject matter.

Nielsen initially sued VideoAmp, claiming infringement of its U.S. Patent Nos. 11,871,058 and 11,856,250. Both patents are titled “Methods and Apparatus to Determine a Duration of Media Presentation Based on Tuning Session Duration.” That complaint was dismissed in March 2025 after a judge found all claims of both patents ineligible. Several days later, Nielsen sued VideoAmp again, accusing it of infringing its U.S. Patent No. 12,063,402, titled “Methods and Apparatus to Correlate Census Measurement Data with Panel Data.” According to today’s opinion, the ‘402 patent is “generally directed to associating identified user data with media being displayed.”

VideoAmp argued that the claims of the ‘402 patent were directed to “the abstract idea of ‘associating demographic data with media content using location.’” But Nielsen argued that the relevant claim “recites a technological solution to the ‘Out-of-Home Problem’ – i.e., a technological problem of how to accurately report demographic information for individuals who watch media content outside of their homes, such as at a bar.”

The district court agreed with VideoAmp, noting that “the claim is drafted in broad functional language, claiming the ultimate result of associating viewer data and media data rather than any particular method of achieving that result.” This type of claiming is “routinely” found to be directed to an abstract idea by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, said the court.

The order went on to distinguish the caselaw cited by Nielsen, explaining that the claims in both Gracenote, Inc. v. Free Stream Media Corp and Thales Visionix Inc. v. United States “focused on solving a problem in the functioning itself of technology – position detection with inertial sensors (Thales) or fingerprinting multimedia (Gracenote),” while Nielsen’s claims attempt to solve a problem rooted in human behavior.

Instead, the court analogized the claim to Electric Power Group, LLC v. Alstom S.A., 830 F.3d 1350 (Fed. Cir. 2016) and ultimately found it to be focused on “collecting and analyzing data – not any improved technology for doing so.”

While Nielsen argued the use of a mobile phone to sense the location data and then collect and provide location and demographic data for an audience member made should have saved it from abstraction, the court said that “using a generic mobile phone to perform [the] abstract process is not what the Enfish court meant by a technological improvement that affects the ‘directed to’ inquiry at step one.”

At Alice step two, the court said that each of the individual limitations recited by the claim “embody the abstract idea or use generic technology to implement the abstract idea,” and therefore the only question left to analyze was “whether the ordered combination of steps in claim 21 provides a saving inventive concept.” But the court found that the claim elements merely “embody the abstract idea or use a generic mobile phone operating in a conventional way” and that combining those elements in the particular order of the claim “fails to transform the claim into something significantly more’ than the abstract idea.”

The magistrate judge thus recommended granting VideoAmp’s motion to dismiss. The decision is not final, as Nielsen can file an objection within 14 days of being served with the Recommendation and Report.

In a statement sent to IPWatchdog, a spokesperson for the company said:

“We are reviewing the decision and plan to file an objection, in which we will explain to the Judge that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was correct in its determination that Nielsen’s patent is, in fact, subject matter eligible.”

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